


Welcome to the New Age

by thesnowyswan



Series: Kinktober: 2018 [2]
Category: Emmerdale
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Supernatural Bonds, mentions of canon self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 18:50:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16247699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesnowyswan/pseuds/thesnowyswan
Summary: [10.Hair-pulling | Waxplay | Micro/Macro |Bonds(Telepathic or Empathic)]After the Government overthrow five years ago, it’s been hell, and no one can explain why. All they do know is certain people, individuals, are being rounded up and carted off. Aaron Dingle was one of them.[...]“Yeah?” He asks, forcefully, as Aaron looks down. Every part of him is dripping with not wanting to be there, so Robert can’t understand why he is.“Can I sleep here?” Aaron says in a rush, his face grumpy and put out.





	Welcome to the New Age

**Author's Note:**

> As always thanks to @illgetmerope, @rustandruin and @robertisbisexual for their soothing encouragement of me.
> 
> Special thanks to @letthebluerain for the title (Imagine Dragon’s Radioactive is this fic’s theme song) and basically telling me to let the beast run.
> 
> Stories like this are some of my favourite to write, but they’re also the ones that give me the most anxiety. So, this is truly a gift from me to you. I hope you enjoy it.

“You’re telling me that the fate of the human race lies in the hands of that irritated—” Robert looks over at the corner that their newest rebel sympathiser is sitting in, and he shakes his head, “man-child?”

Robert can feel a pair of glaring eyes on him and he ignores it.

Joe pinches the bridge of his nose before he looks Robert in the eye, “Look, he’s the promised whatever the hell, I don’t know, I don’t care, I just want this crap to end.”

After the Government overthrow five years ago, it’s been hell, and no one can explain why. All they do know is certain people, _individuals_ , are being rounded up and carted off. Aaron Dingle was one of them. Or he would have been if he hadn’t holed himself up in his mum’s pub with enough fire power to blow a tank to kingdom come.

Robert heads over to Aaron, him sitting on the crappy little reclining chair that they stole out of somewhere, “Come on then, what’s so special about you?”

Aaron looks up at him like he’d rather eat dirt, “I can spot a knob a mile off?”

“Har har, funny, look, we’ve got a funny one,” Robert deadpans, and Aaron leans back in his chair.

“There ain’t nothing special about me, mate.”

“Clearly, but someone likes to think so, and I think you know why.”

There is a minute moment where the light in Aaron’s eyes dims, and Robert knows it’s true. Aaron knows why they’re after him, but he isn’t going to tell anyone else.

“It’s wise, y’know,” Robert tells him as he turns back to head out of the tent with Joe, “to keep yourself safe. Shame the rest of us don’t have that luxury.”

 

 

*

 

They pack up their tents in the morning and move up to Home Farm. It’s where Joe used to live before everything went to hell in a hand basket. Robert watches Aaron watch Joe touch the things that used to be his. There aren’t photos or anything like that, Joe isn’t that sort of bloke, but the life he had before, it was nice. Now he sleeps on the floor with the rest of them, trying to hold on to how it used to be.

Robert doesn’t hold on to anything because he knows they can’t go back, but maybe, with Aaron, there’s something better out there.

Aaron looks at him, and Robert feels invaded, like Aaron’s stare can peel the flesh from his bones and expose his beating heart to the air. Aaron looks off like he’s bored of Robert, but Robert feels instant relief the moment Aaron stops focusing those very blue eyes on him.

 

 

 

Within the rebellion, there are more combative units, lads and lasses who know who to fight who defend the main camp, but Robert isn’t a part of one of those groups. He’s leadership through and through even if he doesn’t want to be. It affords him a nice little one room shack in the base of operations circle, keeping the rain off his back while people knock at his door to ask him questions and ask for help.

There’s one solitary knock at his door the night they reach camp again, Robert opening it up to see Aaron standing at his door with a sleeping bag rolled up under one arm.

Robert knows they’ve allocated Aaron a space to sleep closer to the centre, more defended. Robert’s hut is more along the outskirts and closer to the forest-y edge.

“Yeah?” He asks, forcefully, as Aaron looks down. Every part of him is dripping with not wanting to be there, so Robert can’t understand why he is.

“Can I sleep here?” Aaron says in a rush, his face grumpy and put out.

Robert holds back a laugh, “You want to what?”

Aaron grits his teeth, and Robert can see it, his jaw clenching, but he still looks up, looks Robert in the eye, “Can. I. Sleep. Here?”

That mesmerising blue seems endless, so Robert turns his back on Aaron and leaves his door open, “You’d be safer out there.”

Aaron’s feet scuffing the floor is the only sound he makes as he comes into Robert’s space, “Thanks.”

Robert picks up one of his books, Raymond Chandler, and heads back over to his cot in the right hand corner. Space he can give, his bed, not a chance. Aaron silently unrolls his sleeping bag onto the bit of floor space Robert has before proceeding to get into it, facing away from him.

Robert folds his book closed before he frowns, “Night?”

Aaron doesn’t answer him back at all.

 

 

He’s also gone when Robert wakes up. His roll is still there, but his person isn’t. Joe comes banging on his door and he’s out of breath when Robert opens it up.

“Have you seen Aaron?”

“What’d’you mean, have I seen Aaron?” Robert raises his eyebrows as Joe shoves past him into his hut, the urgency not lost on him.

“He disappeared.”

Robert grabs Joe’s arm, pulling him back to face him, “How could he disappear?”

“Last night—”

Aaron fills up the doorway as Joe and Robert look at him, “The accommodation was shit, so I changed it.”

Robert eyes Aaron’s sleeping bag and there is no way what he had here was better than anything in the camp.

“And then I needed a piss, is that alright?

Joe shakes Robert off and he steps towards Aaron, “Aaron, you can’t just—”

Aaron’s face darkens, “What? I can’t just what?”

“A lot depends on you.”

“I didn’t ask for that,” Aaron says quietly as he knocks into Joe and puts some kindling on the floor next to Robert’s makeshift fireplace.

Robert decides to take control of the situation, “Er, Joe, why don’t you come back later, have words with Aaron then?”

Joe clearly doesn’t want to, but Robert cocks his head and all but throws him out the door.

“Why did you really sleep here last night, Aaron?”

Aaron looks up at him from where he’s kneeling on the floor, “I fancy ya.”

It’s deflection, pure and simple, “Yeah? Come to see me in my saggy pants because I’ve had them for soddin’ ever?”

Aaron smiles, small and a bit tight, but it’s there. He stands up and dusts off his hands, “You think ‘m jokin’?”

Robert smiles back at him, “I think you’re scared. We all are, which is why we need to help each other.”

 

 

*

 

There is another planning meeting. Planning what, no one knows because no one knows shit. Robert looks at the schematics of Number 10.

“What, you want to storm the gates and throw Aaron at them?” He asks, incredulous, and Aaron snorts from behind his battered-up newspaper. How he even got it is a mystery, but he’s been more intent on that than anything else this whole time.

“He’d be more useful,” Ross Barton pipes up from the back, and Robert can feel his IQ being lowered.

“A man’s use isn’t how well he can throw his fists at something, Ross,” Robert snaps. He and Ross get on pretty well, day-to-day. They’re not cut from the same cloth, but they don’t rub each other up the wrong way either. Aaron gets a pinched look on his face when he’s near Ross, which sets Robert on edge.

Aaron stands up, folding his paper down, “Well, cheers for that.”

He starts to head out when someone grabs his arm, “ _Don’t_.”

Aaron pulls away like he’s been burnt, and whoever touched him rips their hand away, the skin that Robert can see as he pushes his way towards Aaron is sallow and bloodless.

“Aaron—” Robert calls, and Aaron turns into him with his head bowed like he’s seeking shelter in the strength of Robert’s body. “We’re done here.”

Someone starts to protest, but Robert puts his arm around Aaron’s shoulders and guides him out, ignoring every voice to the contrary.

 

 

 

Robert can’t deny that he feels weird touching Aaron as he navigates them through the camp. He takes him back to what is slowly becoming their hut, Aaron having his rations delivered there, people coming to ask him things there, some of the kids lurk outside for a glimpse of their ‘saviour’. It’s been a couple of days, but somehow it feels like there has never been a time before Aaron.

He opens the door and he puts Aaron down on his cot, “Hey.”

Aaron doesn’t seem to hear him, so Robert touches his knees, “Aaron.”

There’s nothing in his body or his eyes, just an empty void. Robert forces Aaron to lie down on the cot, his exposed hands freezing while Robert makes them a little fire before he gets in behind Aaron to try and warm up his back.

He realises that maybe that’s not what Aaron wants, he cried out when someone touched him, so Robert takes his hands off him to a soft pained moan.

“No, keep…” Aaron snuggles his head into Robert’s pillow, “’s quiet.”

Robert wraps his arm around Aaron’s waist and holds his wrist in his hand, his nose pressed against Aaron’s shoulder as he slowly relaxes, and for a lack of anything else to do, Robert lets the heat of the fire and Aaron’s body lull him to sleep.

 

 

Robert wakes up with Aaron’s head tucked under his chin, their legs intertwined and Aaron possessively holding his hip.

He tries to disengage his arm from being around Aaron’s waist, but the movement makes him rub his face against Robert’s chest and draws out an unhappy noise. Robert lets out a breath because the longer they stay like this the more his body responds to it, Aaron’s fingers flexing on his skin before they slope around the curve of his hipbone and onto his arse.

_Don’t grab, don’t grab, don’t—_

He does. Robert is forced to roll half onto Aaron’s front as he rolls onto his back, handful of Robert’s bum at the same time.

“Aaron, wake up,” Robert whispers, trying not to jar him. Robert looks up as far as he can, and he screws his eyes shut to pray for some assistance.

None is afforded to him, Aaron rests his nose in the join between Robert’s neck and his shoulder and snores delicately against the skin.

Part of Robert just wants to curse Aaron: _you cock, you absolute fucking cock in a sock, you twat_ —

Aaron’s hand slides off his arse and up his back, stroking the long line of his spine. Aaron’s breathing stutters, and Robert knows he’s awake. Hands come off him immediately and finally Robert is free to sit up.

Aaron grumbles out a sleep soft “sorry” that makes Robert smile.

“Don’t worry about it, you clearly needed it.”

Aaron swings his legs over so that he sits up over the edge of the cot, “I don’t sleep.”

Robert is about to say something to the contrary, but he realises that Aaron means _he doesn’t sleep_.

“If you don’t sleep—” _why did you bring your roll in here?_

Aaron stands up and no more questions will be answered, Robert can feel it.

“Aaron.”

“Sorry ‘bout your bed,” and then he disappears like he has been doing, only this time, Robert worries about him when he goes.

 

 

*

 

Robert is tidying up when Joe comes back over, “Everything alright?”

He’s remade his bed, and he notices his Raymond Chandler book is gone. Aaron must have taken it.

“Yeah, Aaron just needed to sleep, he hasn’t been.”

 _I don’t sleep_ glares in Robert’s brain like a massive clue to something he doesn’t know yet.

“Yeah, well, we want him tip top.”

Robert frowns, Joe is technically right, they want Aaron’s help, but the implication he makes is less…collaborative.

“He’s here, ain’t he?” Robert points out as he starts clanging around with his tea pot, a little iron thing that he puts over the fire now because Aaron often brings him back good kindling.

“Here, but not here, Robert, we still don’t know anything about him. About why they wanted him.”

Robert doesn’t like what he reads on Joe’s face.

“ _He’s_ not a weapon, Joe, he’s a person. Someone who has lost people too.” When they found Aaron at the pub, he was all alone. He hadn’t always been. His family was numerous, from what Robert remembers. Chas, Cain, Charity, Zac, Dingles were plentiful before the overthrow.

Aaron lost all of them.

“I have to go.” Robert says quickly, Joe looks at him with confusion, trying to catch his arm only to end up with empty space.

 

 

 

Robert goes around the camp asking for Aaron, no one has seen him. He asks Alicia and David, Tracey and Vanessa, even Bob and Brenda, none have seen him.

He’s at a loss when April, Marlon’s daughter comes up to him and says she’ll tell him, for a price.

Robert narrows his eyes at her, “Really?”

“One cupcake.”

It’s a hard bargain, but he knows there has been some just baked and everyone gets one in their rations. For Aaron’s whereabouts, he does the deal.

“He sits in the forest most of the day, we take him stuff to read,” She gestures to the other kids.

“Thank you,” Robert waves her off with the promise of his ration ticket.

 

 

 

He supposes he should have asked her to be more thorough. Robert gets stuck in the squelching mud twice and falls over three thick hidden branches before he finds Aaron sitting in a clearing.

“So, this is what you do when you don’t sleep,” Robert says conversationally as Aaron looks over at him.

“Passes the time.”

There’s something old about the way Aaron says what he says. How distant his eyes become after.

“Aaron, please tell me what’s going on.”

Silence.

“I can’t help if I don’t know.”

Aaron looks at him again, this time into his eyes, and Robert gets that feeling, that flayed open and raw feeling. He perseveres, he refuses to look away. It’s like it bubbles up everything inside Robert, all the things he wants to say, but doesn’t, all the feelings he feels, but denies. Aaron looks so beautiful surrounded by the grass and the trees. A part of nature, free and pure.

Aaron chuckles to himself, and Robert blinks, “What?”

Robert watches Aaron pat the space next to him, “Sit.”

He falls to his knees and then sits so that he can cross his legs Indian style.

“It’s quiet out here,” Aaron tells him, and Robert remembers how Aaron said it was quiet in the hut.

So, he asks, “Is that important?”

Aaron shrugs, “It’s different.”

Robert feels like he’s on the cusp of something, on the cusp of understanding Aaron, and he wants that, he wants it more than anything else.

Aaron looks down and Robert tilts his chin back up with his fingers. It’s a stupidly perfect moment for it. Aaron leaning his head just so, Robert doing the same as they meet in the middle for the slightest touch of their lips. Robert doesn’t know why, but he thought that if they ever kissed, it would be lightning bolts; angry and fierce. Instead, it’s warm like sunny summer days when he was a kid and he would sit outside feeding the lambs. It fills him up with a sense of home in a way he hasn’t felt in years.

He tries to lean back in, but Aaron pulls away from him.

“Aaron—”

“The others killed themselves,” he says quietly, and Robert’s heart seizes, “If they weren’t taken; it’s just a matter of time.”

“What is?”

“For it to drive you mad.”

It being whatever Aaron has that can stop it all.

“Can you get rid of it?”

“I thought you wanted me to help,” Aaron stands up and brushes his hands down on his thighs.

 _I want you to live_.

Aaron offers Robert his hand to help him stand up, so he takes it, watches as Aaron rubs his thumb over his knuckles.

“I ain’t worth saving,” Aaron tells him before he lets Robert’s hand drop.

Aaron leaves Robert in the green as he heads back to camp, and Robert can’t calm the twisting maelstrom of his own feelings. Aaron has him completely shook up and he can’t get back to who he was before they kissed.

He ignores everyone who tries to talk to him when he’s walking through the main living area, a few turned over branches people turned into benches. Robert is heading straight for his hut.

Robert opens the door to Aaron’s back. Maybe sense has left his body, but Robert turns Aaron around by his shoulders and refuses to be denied a kiss. Not the warm kind like they just shared, but the one he expected from them, the one he makes out of nothing by shoving Aaron back up against the wall of their little world away from the world.

Aaron does his best to cling on, his hands holding Robert’s elbows as Robert rewrites their second kiss to what it should be, his own moans filling up the space between them as Aaron pushes back with his mouth and pulls Robert in with his hands. Robert weighs in on Aaron, pins his hips back with his own with steady rolls and one of his knees forcing its way between Aaron’s thighs.

“You—” Aaron tries with heavy breaths, but Robert holds his chin with his hand, turning it aside so that he can bite at Aaron’s throat, “You don’t want this.”

 _How could I not?_ Robert feels on fire, heat under his skin, need throbbing in his bones.

“Robert, it’s me, I’m—”

Robert ignores Aaron’s protests, they’re weak and futile as he gets his hands on Aaron’s belt, pulling the leather out from the metal.

“ _Robert_.”

He finally looks at Aaron, who’s a wreck, his mouth red and slick, his chest rising and falling rapidly like the mirror image of what Robert feels.

“I’m an empath. That’s why they want me.”

 _Empath_.

It’s a word that slowly penetrates Robert’s brain.

“I can feel what other people are feeling,” Aaron explains, “I can change what people are feeling.”

 _Get Aaron in a crowd and he could swing a mass vote_ , Robert’s brain immediately supplies. His body though, his body feels cold as he lets Aaron down from how he’s had him pressed up on his tiptoes to satisfy Robert’s need for him.

_Or is it even his need at all?_

“So, you—” Robert gestures between them, “You made me—”

Aaron looks bereft, “I didn’t mean—”

He has to go.

“No, Robert, wait.”

Robert stumbles outside, and thankfully, Aaron doesn’t follow him because he doesn’t know what he would say.

Aaron is an empath.

_He can control people._

_He controlled me_ , he thinks. It's all he thinks.

 

 

 

Robert uses his alcohol ration for the month at the beer tent rather than to go home, and he tries to blot everything out. He’s swaying a bit in his seat when Ross comes and sits down in front of him with a beer of his own.

“Where’s your boyfriend?”

Robert scowls, “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Ain’t he? You two are attached at the hip,” Ross laughs, but then his face turns serious, “Really. What happened?”

Ross doesn’t care about Aaron, he only cares about using Aaron. Maybe they’re made for each other.

“Why do you care?” Robert looks at his glass, almost empty, and he takes Ross’s.

“Hey—! He’s stuck to you like one of them ducks without a mum.”

“Attached?” Robert mumbles, and Ross nods.

“He looks…squirrelly when he ain’t with you.”

Robert frowns and takes a sip of his pilfered beer, “What’d’you mean?”

Ross glares at him, but lets him keep the pint, “Right, you don’t ever see ‘im without you. He keeps himself to himself. Edges ‘round corners like he might die if someone comes near ‘im.”

He thinks about Aaron’s outcry when someone touched him in the meeting, about his assertion that others like him killed themselves, _the damn quiet_.

 _Oh_.

“Shit.”

“Y’alright, mate, whoa!” Ross grabs the glass as Robert almost sloshes it over in his hurry to get up.

 

He goes banging through his front door at a hundred miles per hour.

 

Aaron is looking at him with glassy eyes from Robert’s cot, trying to turn away from him to hide the blood on his top.

Robert wants to cry; “the emotions are loud.”

Aaron looks at him like he’s been slapped in the face.

“I made them quiet for you, that’s why you came to my hut. You slept here because I made it quiet.”

Robert gets onto his knees in front of Aaron, and Aaron looks away as Robert peels up his shirt. He has scars all over his stomach; some old, years old, some new, purple and raised, and some still bleeding from Aaron’s need for a distraction.

As if he needs some justification, Aaron tells him, “The pain makes it quiet.”

_But for how long?_

“Lemme do it instead,” Robert tells him, his hand blindly reaching for the knife in Aaron’s, chucking it somewhere behind him.

“Robert…”

Just like they did before, Robert guides Aaron to lie down on the cot, but this time they squish in face to face.

“Do you need a doctor?” He asks once, and Aaron shakes his head no. Robert doesn’t ask how he knows that he doesn’t.

Robert pretends that he doesn’t feel Aaron silently crying on his shoulder, and how he snuggles further into it, gingerly wrapping his arm around Robert’s waist, but only after Robert forcibly hugs him to his side while whispering, ‘take what you need’.

He wonders if this is what control feels like because if anything, Robert feels like he’s weightless and without any. His stomach is swooping like he’s on a rollercoaster, only it’s relentless and without end.

He presses a kiss to the top of Aaron’s head and that’s how they stay, in their clothes, on top of his cot and just trying to hold on.

 

 

*

 

The new day brings new change. Robert watches as Aaron finally seems to unfurl, even if it’s only with him in their hut. He becomes bossier, forcing Robert to move things around more to his liking, and he doesn’t even bother with his sleeping bag anymore, he just gets in bed around Robert or is in there before Robert comes to bed.

All of it feels tentative, on both sides. Especially when Joe comes by again, pressing Robert for more information on Aaron, and Robert actively denies knowing anything.

“I thought you would’a told him,” Aaron says as Robert sits back down for their porridge breakfast.

“Why? It’s not his business.”

Aaron puts his spoon down.

Robert puts his down too, he takes a breath, “If I thought…”

He looks at Aaron watching him with those blue eyes of his.

“If I thought he had your best interests at heart, I’d tell ‘im.”

And there it is.

They’re all sitting in squalor, crushed under the weight of a regime that wants to destroy any rebellion within its walls because Robert won’t give up Aaron. Not for one second of something better if he thinks Aaron might be hurt by it.

Aaron puts a hand on Robert’s forearm and leans over to kiss him. It’s just a catch of lips and he goes right back to his breakfast, but Robert can’t help but smile as he picks up his.

 

 

 

Aaron also has beer rations he’s been saving up.

“C’mon then, let’s have a drink.”

It’s the first sign of interest he’s ever shown in wanting to go into the main square bit, which is essentially a patch of dirt in the middle of the huts and tents in the camp. Robert supposes that now he knows, Aaron feels freer to say, “let’s try this,” because he has someone to share it with if it goes wrong.

Robert folds his book closed, Georges Perec this time.

“You want to buy me a drink?” He teases, and Aaron rolls his eyes.

“You want a beer or not?”

“’Course, let’s go.”

People seem to stop and stare at Aaron, and he forces himself to deal with the attention. It’s silent, too, how he does it. Robert only knows because he’s spent so much time with Aaron that it’s as little as a tic of his jaw that shows his discomfort.

Still, he gets them both a beer and they sit on one of the benches making small talk.

“Your mum used to run a pub, didn’t she?” Robert says as he licks his foamy lip.

Aaron’s gaze sharpens, “Yeah.”

Robert sees that, and he smiles, “I remember her, Chas, she used to serve me when I was eighteen.”

“Oh.”

Robert wants to say he’s sorry for Aaron’s loss, but he has his own losses he doesn’t want to mention, family he has buried in land that used to be theirs. He becomes aware that he might be dragging on Aaron’s mood and he tries to cheer himself up.

“It doesn’t work like that.”

Robert’s eyes snap up to Aaron’s. It’s the first he’s ever mentioned about how his empathy actually works.

“I mean, it does. But one shitty emotion doesn’t bother me. Day in, day out…”

Robert knows what Aaron’s skin looks like.

“But I make it quiet.”

Aaron nods, turning the bottom of his beer cup.

“I feel some of what you do, but it’s more like you’re through cotton wool. You disrupt my signal.”

He imagines Aaron with a little antenna and a light on the end, and it gets a smile out of them both.

“I don’t know what you just thought, but it made you happy, so it was probably stupid.”

“Hey!” Robert pinches Aaron’s hand where it’s next to him on their tree bench, and Aaron shoves at him, almost making Robert drop his cup.

He doesn’t want to ask, but he does: “And the other stuff?” _The control_.

Aaron bites the corner of his lip into his mouth, lets it go before he says, “If I want something bad enough, I just have to feel it. Then it affects everyone around me.”

It’s a powerful ability to have, and a heavy price to pay.

Robert can’t help but wonder how it applied to them, that day Aaron told him the truth. Aaron wanted him, wanted him enough to believe that he had forced his will onto Robert. Only, looking back, Robert never felt that way. He wanted Aaron, he chased Aaron down, pulled him into _his_ embrace.

Even now, with the camp fire burning and flickering light on Aaron’s face, Robert wants him. Wants one hundred of those daft dimpled smiles that Aaron does when something truly makes him laugh.

Aaron looks at him, “What?”

“C’mon.”

“Wait, my beer—”

“Leave it.”

Robert drags Aaron up by his wrist, doesn’t slow down as he marches them back to their hut.

“Er, so much for a night out—” Aaron’s words get swallowed by Robert’s mouth, Aaron’s breaths disappear too as Robert slants his lips tighter over his, and his fingers dig harshly into Aaron’s sides.

Aaron stumbles over their teapot, kicking it out of his way as he turns Robert towards the cot, pulling at his jumper at the same time to get it over his head.

Robert closes his eyes as it goes over and immediately gets back to kissing Aaron, holding his face as he sits down so that Aaron has to climb into his lap to keep kissing him. There’s so much he wants to do, so many places he wants to touch, just rubbing his hands along Aaron’s thighs, it’s more than anything Robert’s ever felt before.

His t-shirt comes up, Aaron’s jacket ends up on the floor, his top is a sticking point, so Robert leaves it where it is, instead dragging it up until he can mouth wetly at the skin of Aaron’s chest that way.

“Oh, for fucks—” and Aaron throws it off. Robert thumps the back of his head on the wall with a laugh as Aaron pushes him down.

“Easy, tiger.”

“Twat,” Aaron fights with Robert’s belt, and Robert starts in on his.

They wrestle with the last of their clothes, and Aaron gets a cramp in one calf, which Robert remedies it by tipping him onto the cot on his side while he sucks kisses down on his ribs and waist before he gets himself up and over Aaron.

It’s like a blessed relief when Aaron’s fingers gently touch his naked waist, his legs falling open as Robert rubs the inside of one of his thighs.

Aaron raises his eyebrows with a look of expectation, and Robert just laughs at him: “I see.”

It’s okay, it’s what he wants. Wrapping his hand around Aaron’s cock, and the grunt that falls out of him from his chest is everything. Shuffling down, Robert takes Aaron into his mouth and tries his best to swallow him down, stroking what he can’t fit in with his hand. All he has to do is look up from where he is to see Aaron forcing his head back into the pillow as he arches off the cot, panting the longer Robert wetly sucks on his dick. Everything he feels, everything he wants, that’s all him.

He tastes salt on his tongue, so he draws off, Aaron looking down at him with the sort of contempt that comes with thwarted pleasure. Robert hooks Aaron’s legs over his arms and pulls him up so that his bum is resting on his thighs when he moves back up on the cot. At the same time, Aaron fights to get his hand around the back of Robert’s neck to pull him in for a kiss. Or, rather, an approximation of a kiss as their mouths slide against each other, Robert still pulling on Aaron’s cock, and him spilling out little moans against Robert’s lips where he can’t hold them back.

Aaron pulls his lip between his teeth again, “Okay, okay.”

Robert lets him go with a flat palmed stroke over his cock and balls. He gets flicked on the arm for it. He spits onto his fingers as Aaron stuffs his hand under Robert’s pillow.

“No lube?” Aaron asks him with a cheeky sort of smile.

Robert still uses it to press one finger against Aaron’s rim, but he takes the bottle too when Aaron shoves it at him, “How—” _did you know?_

“Empath,” Aaron winces a bit and lifts his bum up, “And you have a wank every morning.”

 _That is…mortifying_.

“So, you just listened to me wank?”

“I don’t _listen._ ”

That takes a second of understanding.

“You felt—”

“Yeah.”

“Did you…?”

Aaron glares at him, his arse almost full with one of Robert’s fingers, but Robert isn’t letting this go.

“Aaron, did you get off on me spanking the monkey—?”

Aaron interrupts him with a disgusted scoff, “You can’t call it that.”

Robert tugs on his balls, and he shuts up. It’s the not so innocent thought of it. The times Robert turned over under his thin blanket, palm slick and biting his own lips to stop himself from crying out, and for what? Aaron already knew. Could feel in some part the coiling heat in his belly, the hot tingles along his shaft as he stroked himself off.

“Robert.”

“Can you feel it now?” He asks, uncapping the lube and covering two fingers and resets himself to his task, “Me thinking about it, how it felt.”

“I felt it the first—” Aaron grunts when Robert pushes his finger inside, more roughly than before. He doesn’t always use lube for his morning wank, it’s more a luxury, and on the slim off chance he’d want to have sex, it isn’t in abundance. But it was one of the mornings, before he knew, Robert indulged himself. Aaron was walking around in his top and pants waiting for his trousers to dry. So, Robert just pretended like he was still sleeping, rolling onto his side while shuffling his pants down onto his thighs. He didn’t want to, but he’d been holding out for days, not knowing when Aaron was going to disappear and reappear at will, and in his mind, it was a lot worse to be caught with his cock out rather than _under_.

He didn’t intend for his imagination to be Aaron, but he’s seen glimpses of him, dark hair covering his forearm as he fished his spoon out of their washing up bowl, thick fingers that Robert thinks might be twice the size of his own. So, it was Aaron’s hands on his body, tightening with the smooth gel coating them. Aaron’s voice in his head encouraging him to speed up, but not too much so that the blanket moved conspicuously.

“Did you know it was you that I was thinking about?” Robert asks him as he curls his hand around Aaron’s thigh, pushing it up and out of his way. Aaron hasn’t flagged at all, so Robert presses his middle finger in alongside his index finger, watching Aaron’s mouth gape like a fish as he works himself over Robert’s second knuckles.

Aaron licks his lips, “I feel, _ah_ , ‘m not a mind reader.”

Still, the head of Aaron’s cock drips a little precome onto his belly, sticking in the hair that snakes down to his pelvis. He slaps the hand Robert is rubbing on his chest, dragging over his ribs, and Robert lets him go, slips his fingers out of his arse and lets Aaron come down from whatever tension he’s feeling.

If he’s honest, he thinks he feels a prickle of static like before it rains running across his skin and he doesn’t know if it’s true or if it’s some part of Aaron’s power tickling the edge of his consciousness.

“C’mere,” Aaron pulls at his sides again, and Robert goes down onto his belly, chest to chest with Aaron as he wraps his arms around his back to roll him over onto his, the cot creaking with the weight of them as they move.

Robert’s cock jerks with excitement when he feels Aaron’s fingers close to the crease of his hip. It’s been awhile, ‘daily’ wanks notwithstanding – it’s not _every_ day – so it doesn’t take much to get his stomach quivering and his thighs tense.

Aaron looks like he’s about to take his dick in his mouth, instead, he moves off down to the side of it, kissing with his rough beard the skin right next to Robert’s balls. It’s the biggest cocktease and Robert hates and loves it. He does it to the other side before he tucks his lips over his teeth and he takes Robert further down than he ever could to him.

Robert scrambles to claw his fingers into the wooden wall behind his head, “Oh, _shit_.”

He can’t help but trap Aaron where he is with his thighs practically around his head, but Aaron doesn’t seem to care. He takes his task seriously, and he swirls his tongue around the tip before sucking on it tightly and then letting himself off with a pop.

Aaron pushes Robert’s thighs down as he gets up off the cot and Robert straightens his legs so that Aaron can get back over him with his thighs either side of his. Robert watches intently as Aaron rubs himself in front of him, not to come, but to feel good, and the electricity feels like it’s back.

“Get up here,” Robert demands, and Aaron moves up so that he’s in line with Robert’s groin, and his hand reaches blindly back.

Robert makes indents in Aaron’s skin where he grips him so hard as he sinks himself down on Robert’s cock. He circles his hips before rolling them back, and Robert just has to hold on, his body twitching as Aaron already sparks the good feelings inside him.

Aaron leans over him, his hand splaying on the middle of his chest and he asks Robert softly, “You wanna feel it?”

He does.

He lifts himself up onto his hands and then he wraps his arms around Aaron’s waist as he reaches up for a kiss. Aaron holds his face in his hands and pushes his lips open with his tongue. Robert feels it there first, the crackle of what feels like a flash of lightning in physical form as it races down his cheeks and dissipates in his sternum. After that he feels warmth; hard, heating, and increasing its space inside him until he’s burning but also pushing him with his body, thrusting up furiously into Aaron as he wetly breathes like he’s run a marathon.

Aaron curses ‘fuck’ before he closes his eyes and rubs his forehead against Robert’s, one hand disappearing, and Robert can feel Aaron’s knuckles against his stomach as he strips his cock. He closes his own eyes to the arousing image. The heat has moved down now, it’s focused completely on his groin, and Robert feels himself stutter as he fails to cope with how good it feels. Suddenly, it pulls back, eases in its intensity, Robert opens his eyes to Aaron shaking but still moving, still riding him and still stroking the tip of his own dick.

“Don’t take it back,” Robert tells him, “I can handle it.”

He nods, and the heat returns with a furore. Robert almost collapses under it, but instead, he grabs a handful of Aaron’s arse in each hand and he forces him down onto his own cock. Rather than waiting to be consumed, Robert throws himself into destroying Aaron, reaming him with thick thrusts that bounce him off his hips and his grunts turn into heavy groans and his cock dribbles steadily over his fingers.

Robert can’t help but flop onto his back, pulling his knees up as he plants his feet on the cot and keeps going. Aaron looks wrecked, his hand barely moving, he’s just accepting what Robert is giving him until everything turns silent. Inside and out. Aaron shouts, falling to one hand on Robert’s chest again, his other hand moving faster again as he shoots hot come all over them both. Robert uses that freedom to push Aaron through his whimpers of _too much_ to create his own heat. It’s less, it’s a nonentity in comparison to what Aaron spread inside him, but he wills Aaron to feel it, _for you_ , as he collapses into nothingness. He comes, but he’s detached from it, floating away as Aaron tries to tether him with strong kisses and fingers clasping his jaw.

“That was—” Robert smiles, and Aaron smiles back at him, both a bit punch drunk. “Are you?”

Aaron gets himself off Robert’s dick and pushes him to lie on his side, Aaron tucking in behind him with a leg thrown possessively over his.

A hairy kiss scratches at his shoulder, “’m fine.”

“Good.”

Robert lets tiredness come for him, he needs it. He feels strung out like he’s hit the highest of highs and he’s about to fall into the lowest of lows. He clings to the floaty feeling and it sends him drifting off to sleep.

 

 

 

Aaron is still asleep when Robert peels his eyes open. He’s free enough to get his arse off the cot, so he does, and puts their kettle on to boil so they have something hot to wash off in. Robert doubts Aaron wants to head to the communal shower area to sponge off his arse crack.

Robert pours half out into one of the canteens they use for travel sometimes and gets his flannel in there for washing the most direct of places.

“Alright?”

There’s a bit of a ‘hey, sailor’ tone to Aaron’s voice when Robert looks back at him, still washing his balls with his flannel. He throws it at Aaron, who wrinkles his nose and chucks it back.

There’s something comfortable about how Aaron gets up and passes Robert with a soft touch along his back as he goes to pour out the rest of the water and dunk his own wash cloth in. They both wait until they’ve brushed their teeth before they pull at each other for a kiss.

“Hey,” Robert teases as he rubs his hands over Aaron’s back and down to his bum.

“Hi?” Aaron questions, and Robert grins before he kisses him. “Don’t you have planning shit to do today?”

There should be another meeting, that’s true, but Joe mostly has it handled, and Robert wants to be handling Aaron.

Aaron pushes at his hips, “C’mon.”

Robert sighs, “But—”

“No ‘buts’,” Aaron leans his head to the side when Robert tries to kiss him again.

“Aaron.”

He isn’t having it, but Robert hems him in, both of them still arse naked before he folds down onto his knees.

Aaron shakes his head no, but Robert just waits him out. It’s another ten seconds until he exhales, and Robert gets him to part his legs a little bit further before he blows Aaron until he can’t stand.

 

 

 

Robert pulls uncomfortably at his jeans as Aaron shoves him out the door.

 _Well, that’s not fair_ , he grumbles to himself as he heads over to the ‘War’ tent. Robert has never favoured calling it that. In truth, he’s never wanted to be a part of any of it, but when Joe proclaimed himself king of the fucking mountain and started making decisions left, right and centre about what people should do now that the world had ended. Robert found he couldn’t stand by and let Joe run innocent people into the ground. He tried to shake Robert off at first, ignored his counsel, but Robert had what Joe didn’t: the people’s support. Robert and his family had been a part of village life for years before the overthrow. Joe came swanning back in on his name and it only went so far, especially with Sugdens and Kings still living and breathing.

People grieved when they lost Robert’s family. Joe’s was already dead.

Ross is already leaning his chair on two legs and his feet up on the table, Joe pointedly ignoring him, and everyone else is milling about.

“Robert, you’re here.”

_I live here where else would I be?_

“Yeah, and?”

“Figured you could tell us, seeing as you’re so close to Aaron,” Joe laces his fingers together like he knows shit, when he doesn’t.

Robert looks over at Ross, who shrugs but carries on sitting on his arse.

“Aaron is a refugee like the rest we’ve taken in.”

“That’s not strictly true, is it?” Joe pushes.

Robert folds his arms, “You think he has something you want, ask him.”

“You know he won’t—”

“What? Respond to you demanding he help fight this war? Prodigal son or not.”

Joe slams his hand down on the table, “Robert, for _God’s_ sake.”

He sighs.

“Aaron can do something, something worth killing him over, so even if you don’t think we should use him, you have to believe that we should be protecting him.”

“We are,” Robert agrees.

“But what? What are we protecting?”

Robert searches Joe’s face, he isn’t letting this go, “If that was all that mattered, you wouldn’t care.”

“I’m tired, Robert. Five years is a long time.”

“It is, but twenty-six years is longer.”

The length of Aaron’s life, how long he has had to live being who he is.

Robert looks around at all of the faces, all of the people who think he should just give Aaron up, whether it’s to Joe or to the Government, none of them are fighting for Aaron.

 _They’re fighting for themselves; for their own survival_.

He just feels sick looking at them.

He turns on his heel and heads out of the tent, back to his hut. Back to Aaron.

 

 

 

Aaron welcomes him back with a brew, but Robert ignores the proffered cup that Aaron proudly displays on the table.

“Wha—whoa,” Aaron barely has time to think before Robert is taking his mouth with his.

Robert bites at Aaron’s lips, urges him to open his mouth, tries to climb inside him with just this kiss, but it’s not enough. He pulls at Aaron’s jumper and just keeps pulling; light and ineffectual.

Aaron tucks his lips over his teeth, “Y’alright?”

Robert tucks his face away in Aaron’s neck with a shake of his head: _no_.

Aaron’s fingers gently guide Robert’s head back up, “What is it?”

“They’re not going to stop until they know what you are.”

Robert feels a whiz of an icy wind pass over him like he’s standing in a Siberian winter.

“I didn’t tell—”

Aaron lets him go and starts to pace, “You’ll have to tell them though.”

“I won’t.”

“It’s not something you can hide forever, Robert.”

Robert understands that Aaron’s scared, but everyone here wants to help. To end the strife. He reaches out for Aaron’s elbow.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Aaron.”

He’s shaking his head and taking his coat, to disappear into the woods, or maybe further. Maybe away.

“Aaron, no.”

“You can’t make me stay here.”

Robert pleads with all that he is, “I’m not, I’m asking you.”

“Why? So that I can save you?” Aaron spits angrily at him.

 _So that you’re safe_.

“You were cutting yourself, before I came in that night, would you do it again, if you went back out there?”

Aaron’s silence is deafening.

“I’m not trying to guilt you into staying, Aaron, I—” He puts his hands on Aaron’s arms, smoothing them down over the lengths of them, “I want you to be okay.”

He still looks at Robert like a cornered animal.

“Go, do whatever, I’ll be here when you get back,” Robert tells him with a tight smile.

 _You just have to come back_.

Aaron doesn’t put his coat on, he puts it back on the floor with the rest of their clothes that have mixed together into one big pile.

Robert turns around and he digs out from under his cot another book, William Faulkner, Aaron takes it and sits on the floor by the door. Robert always offers him to sit on the cot with him, but Aaron likes to sit with his back up against the wood. Robert sees it for what it is now, Aaron likes to be close to see who’s coming, but also how he can escape.

 

 

*

 

It’s a mood that doesn’t ease.

Robert watches Aaron, Aaron pretends not to notice, but still acts just like he did before. The only real difference is that they can only come to an agreement when _they’re coming_. It becomes an activity to pass the time, but also one to also stop them from delving too deep. Robert plays with the hair above Aaron’s cock, twisting his fingers up in his dark curls while he sleeps on his back, face turned away as he dreams. He doesn’t tell Aaron, but he loses control in his dreams. Robert feels his power edge and probe at his consciousness more insistently when Aaron dreams. It’s like a small child constantly tugging on his mental coat tails.

I don’t sleep.

Maybe that’s true, or maybe he didn’t sleep around other people because it was too dangerous. Too easy for them to find out what he truly is. Robert feels a chill skitter up his spine, so he leans down and kisses Aaron’s chest to let him know he isn’t alone. It’s enough to wake him up, his face turning back towards Robert, his brows coming together into a frown to see Robert staring at him.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Robert parcels up his fear and puts it away with every increasing moment of his desire. He puts himself between Aaron’s thighs and he denies himself the truth. Aaron isn’t safe. Robert can’t help him. Instead, he feels the touch of Aaron’s fingers on his bum, firm and unyielding, the moist heat of his breath against Robert’s cheek as Robert rolls his hips.

 _Ignorance is not bliss, it’s a kindness_. One, as time passes, they can afford less and less.

 

 

 

 

The storm hits, literally and figuratively, with a death.

She’s no one Robert knows when they bring her body back to the camp, the rain is soaking the sheet they covered her with. Joe wipes his mouth and tsks in frustration.

“What—what’s going on?” Robert asks as Joe puts his hands on his hips.

“She was one of _them_.”

 _Them. Aaron_.

“They killed her?” Robert asks as he walks over to the pyre they’ve made for her. She’ll burn later in the evening.

Joe shakes his head, “She slit her wrists.”

Robert tries to remain calm, “She thought they were going to find her?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

That gets him to look back at Joe, “What’d’ya mean?”

“The walls in her flat were covered.”

A pit of dread opens up in his stomach, “With what?”

“Nonsense, really.”

Robert breathes a sigh of relief.

“It was obvious she had gone mad. It just means we’ll just have to escalate things.”

“Escalate? What are you talking—?”

Joe heads back towards the War tent, Robert trailing after him.

“If it’s some sort of defect, we don’t know how long we’ll have Aaron for.”

 _Defect, how long? Aaron, gone, broken, bloodied_ , it all runs through Robert’s head.

 

There is shouting outside, and Joe tries to block Robert’s way. Not overtly, subtle. Robert just looks at him before he shoves him out the way.

  
“Lemme go,” Aaron is in the main square, three blokes from a combat unit trying to restrain his arms as he flings one of his legs up to kick the fourth.

“Hey!” Robert tries to throw himself into the fray, two more men trying to hold him back.

Aaron gets his arm free and swings for his closest captor, “Back off!”

Robert sees the sparks of a cattle prod before Aaron does, “Aaron!”

Robert feels something he’s never felt before. It’s bottomless, it’s nothingness, it feels like all of his insides have been emptied out and they have never been.

The man with the prod drops. Not to his knees, flat on his back.

Joe comes out behind Robert, and Aaron is looking beyond Robert to him. There is nothing of the man that Robert has been living with. The man who quietly steals Robert’s books and makes him tea in the morning, touches his body both with irreverent respect and heated demand.

“So that’s why.”

Aaron lifts his chin up, his mind clearly made up. His other two guards are felled.

The fourth man backs away, shaking and holding his hands up.

Robert takes a step forwards and almost slides over in the ensuing mud. He doesn’t understand.

“They came to take you, but they didn’t know. Didn’t realise what they created,” Joe shouts over the rush of rain.

Robert keeps going, if he can just reach Aaron, it’ll be okay.

“They killed your mother.”

That stops him, Aaron’s face going completely cold.

“You felt her die.”

 _All I have to do is feel it_.

Robert looks at the downed men. They’re not unconscious. They’re dead. Aaron killed them because he willed it to be so.

“Once you could defend yourself like that, there was nothing they could do. Save sneaking up on you.” Joe sounds impressed by all of it, Robert feels only a sense of horror. “It’s why you’re the saviour.”

Aaron’s face softens, not because of Joe, but because of Robert, “Robert—”

“Run.” It’s all he can say. Aaron jerks back like he’s been struck, “Run, Aaron.”

He shouts it again, so loudly that his voice goes hoarse, and Aaron goes. Joe tries to get more people involved, but they’re not as fast. They haven’t learned what Aaron has learnt.

Robert doesn’t feel it when he’s put on his knees and his hands cuffed behind his back. There’s nothing left to feel.

 

 

*

 

The first thing they do is take away his sense of time. There’s a cave just off the forest area, and once they throw Robert inside it with a guard, it could be 2am or 2pm for all he knows. He knows his meals move around, his body starving and then being forced to gorge for fear of not knowing when he’ll get food again.

What Robert hates more than anything is that Joe is still trying to get him on his side.

“Why did you do that, Robert? We’re trying to save people.”

 _You’re trying to use one man’s grief to make the world to your liking_.

“That woman, the dead woman—” Robert licks his lips, they’re dry as all hell, and Joe finally offers him a drink, “You looked at her. Looked at her body. And you thought: _I don’t have enough time_.”

He takes the water, gulps it down and it makes him feel sick, but he forces himself to swallow anything that tries to come back up, “You know there’s a cost to what Aaron is, _and you don’t care_.”

“And you do?”

Robert looks down at his feet, they’re naked as they took his shoes the day they threw him in here.

“Do you, Robert? Do you love the man who could kill you with a thought? A feeling? You were just as in the dark as me, but then I didn’t let him screw me.”

Robert is on long chains, pinned to the floor far enough away from Joe, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t get up to rattle them. Intimidate the fucking arsehole.

“Aaron could kill a hundred men and still be better than you.”

“Let’s hope, he’s hot property these days. Wouldn’t want the wrong side getting hold of him.”

Robert strains against his chains again and Joe just leaves him there. Leaves him to his thoughts. His feelings. The empty space that Aaron has unknowingly carved inside him.

Robert sits back down on the floor. Maybe now he’ll count cows instead of sheep.

 

 

*

 

He doesn’t know how many nights he’s been in the cave when the sweating starts. He moans and pulls at his chains, vomiting up what little he has in his stomach and barely rolling away from it before he’s sick again. Someone comes in to poke and prod him, his arms limply hanging as they’re raised up and dropped back down.

“He needs care, real and proper care,” someone says.

His chains clink as they’re dropped. Robert doesn’t have the energy to move, much less care.

When Robert wakes up, he thinks he’s in a hospital. A real functioning hospital. He sits himself up and a nurse comes over to him. He thinks she’s a nurse. She isn’t wearing a uniform. He’s handcuffed to the bed and he rattles his wrist as she comes over with a blood pressure cuff.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like someone starved me and kept me in a cave for ages.”

Her mouth turns disproving, “Dark times.”

His or the necessity of them is a mystery. Yet, Robert tilts his head, “Yeah, caves are.”

She prods him a bit more and gives him some more water, he guesses saline drips are hard to come by – how Joe must have swung getting him into a hospital, it doesn’t bear thinking about – before she leaves him with.

Robert cranes his neck to see how many guards he has.

None that he can see.

Unless Joe has given him up as a rebel sympathiser and he is no longer in Joe’s custody but in that of those in charge of the overthrow.

Panic swells inside Robert’s chest as he jangles the metal harder against the bedframe.

“Alright, alright; what’s going on here?” A nurse, in the correct uniform, says as she comes in with a tray of instruments.

Robert doesn’t want any part of that.

“Nothing, er, nothing.”

She hums and puts it down on the table on wheels and brings it over to where Robert’s cuffed arm is.

“Please don’t,” He asks in a whisper soft voice.

The nurse is young. Pretty, and with blonde hair.

“Don’t worry, it’s just like falling asleep.”

Robert tries to push her away, but she’s got hold of his trapped wrist. The needle pricks his skin and it feels like tingles in the back of his head as his reactions slow.

His eyelids grow heavy despite his fight to stay awake, stay alive. She shushes him and that’s when he realises he’s moaning. Sad little whimpers that peter off as the blackness consumes him.

_Aaron…_

 

 

 

Robert doesn’t expect to wake up.

He expects even less to be in an actual bed.

The hits don’t stop coming when he sees Aaron half sprawled on an armchair at the bottom of said bed.

His ‘nurse’ brings him a cup of tea.

“Robert, right? I’m Belle. Belle Dingle.”

“What—?”

“I’m Aaron’s cousin. I live here,” Belle gestures around herself, “with my mum, and some of the rest of the family.”

 _The ones still left_.

“Just kick him, he should wake up after that,” Belle smiles before she leaves Robert to get himself up and shuffling down to the end of the bed. He still feels weak, but better.

“Aaron?”

Aaron scrunches his eyes closed tighter before he rubs one of them with his knuckles curled into an almost fist.

There’s nothing but relief when Robert’s eyes meet blue. He suddenly feels self-conscious that he looks awful, pale and sickly from his treatment by Joe and that Aaron won’t find him attractive anymore.

“Don’t be daft.”

Aaron squidges in next to him on the bed and holds his cheek in his hand. Robert can’t help but flick his eyes down to Aaron’s lips and back up again. He’s suffused with the sense of that warm summery feeling again, this time it’s a breeze on a sunny day, lights reflecting off of water and he’s so caught up in it, he doesn’t realise Aaron’s kissing him. He clings to him in a way he never has before, desperate to feel whatever connection it is they are fostering.

But there’s a lot they have to talk about.

Still, Robert lets himself ignore it. Instead, he enjoys the rough scratch of Aaron’s stubble, he’s had a shave since Robert last saw him, the simple way that he draws tension out of Robert’s body with little flicks of his tongue.

Aaron is the one who pulls away with a “we should talk.”

Robert sighs. He looks down as Aaron laces their fingers together and drops them onto his thigh.

“I don’t know where to start,” he says honestly.

Aaron nods, “I know.”

They both know he has to start with Chas. What happened to her, how it changed Aaron.

“How did you know to come here?” Robert says with a burst of interest, “I thought all your family was—”

“April.”

 _Marlon…_ Dingle. _Of course_.

“And they’ve been taking care of you?” Robert turns Aaron’s arm over, it’s his right so he doesn’t have any scars on that arm, but the implication is there.

“They’re doing their best.”

“Is it better?” _Now that I’m here?_

“Robert.” _Stop avoiding the question_.

He stands up, wobbly on his feet, and Aaron stands with him, their hands unlaced now so that his is hovering behind Robert’s back.

“You killed three men, Aaron, killed them dead like it was nothing.” Robert licks his lips, “But I know it’s not. I know it cost you something, so what? What could have made that worth it?” _Why would you?_

“I didn’t have a choice,” Aaron sits back down on the bed, “Joe wasn’t going to let me go, not when he knew what he could use me for.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like he could make you _do that_.”

“I still have family.”

Robert feels something sit in his chest when Aaron looks at him and then away.

“And I wanted him to know that he didn’t have me.” Aaron lets out a harsh exhale. “I never wanted to come with you, that night you came to my mum’s pub. I was doin’ just fine.”

 _You were sitting in the dark tearing yourself apart_.

“Don’t,” Aaron warns him.

Robert sits on the window sill front of him so that he’s facing Aaron on the bed, “You weren’t okay, Aaron.”

“I was coping.”

“That’s bullshit.” Robert gets up, ignoring his body’s protests as he gets onto his knees, in front of Aaron once again, “we were both surviving. Existing in hopes that something would change. And it did.”

 _I met you_.

“I make things better for you, that has to mean something. It has to change something for you.”

“What?” Aaron says like he has a lump in his throat, “What does it change? I’m still an empath. I can still feel everyone’s pain in my head like it’s screaming twenty-four hours a day when you’re not around. You gave me peace, Robert, but then you sent me away.”

 _To save you_.

“ _I’m sorry_ ,” he begs Aaron to understand.               

“What’s to be sorry about? I’m the freak, not you.”

 

 

*

 

Aaron takes him down in a tense silence to meet the rest of his family, and to get something to eat. Their matriarch, Lisa, sits him down with a gentle smile and offers him a broth-like soup to start him off and some buttered bread if he can manage it.

Robert notices that Lisa watches Aaron out the corner of her eye the moment he picks up his knife to eat. He’s one part sad, two parts grateful that she’s watching over him. Aaron glares at him out the corner of his eye, but it isn’t weighted, more like he doesn’t like being ganged up on. Belle starts telling them about an outer band of resistance fighters who are trying to build a political case against the overthrow.

They must know about Aaron. About what Joe and the others want from him. Robert can’t understand why they didn’t come for him sooner. But then he sees how Aaron is with Belle. How he jokes with her, listens to her, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows Aaron uses his power to raise everyone’s mood. He thought he was protecting them by making himself a bigger target.

“I need some air,” Robert says as he lets himself out of his chair, Lisa looking at him with worry on her face.

 

 

There’s an old wooden fence Robert finds himself leaning on, the moon full and crisp in the sky as Aaron kicks rocks up as he walks towards Robert.

“I can’t remember the last time I just stood outside,” Robert tells him as Aaron leans on the gate next to him. “Vic used to sit on one of the fences up at the farm, threatening to tip herself back so I’d catch her.”

“You never talk about her.”

Robert smiles, pained, and his mouth closed, “She was my sister.”

He can barely swallow, it hurts so much to think about her.

“Mum barricaded the door,” Aaron looks off into the distance, and Robert holds his breath. “They were trying to take it down, but she had them beat until they brought in the battering ram.”

“They didn’t even stop to ask her her name. They already knew.”

“And they knew she wasn’t gonna stop. So, they shot her.”

Robert feels pain deep in his belly like he’s been torn open and cauterised with heat, he clutches at it, and it disappears immediately when Aaron looks back at him.

“I was behind the bar. She was so scared, not for herself, but because she was leaving me.”

“I tried to make her live, but I didn’t know what it felt like.” Aaron wipes the lone tears leaking down onto both of his cheeks. “They tried to drag me out, but I felt her go.”

“I took that feeling and I pushed it out onto every single one of them.”

“And they died,” Robert interjects, and Aaron nods.

“I didn’t—I never did it again until they came back. It takes a lot.”

Robert can barely imagine. To live the moment his mum died over and over, to feel the life leave her body, her fear at leaving her son behind to his fate.

“You did what she wanted, you saved yourself.”

“Yeah, but at what cost?” Aaron hits the nail on the head. “I’m a murderer who never needs to use a gun. I cut myself because I can’t bear the pain.”

Aaron is pressing his fingernails into his hand, and Robert reaches out to stop him, “Don’t.”      

“S’what I am, Robert, for as long as I can handle it.”

“ _We_. As long as we can handle it.”

Aaron looks at him with a hopeful sort of scepticism, but Robert ignores all of it to lean down and kiss him, softly and without hesitation.

“I’m in this now, with you. Get used to it.”

Robert shivers, his body finally letting the cold seep into his bones, and Aaron steps into him and rubs his shoulders to try and warm him up, “C’mon, you’re freezing.”

 

 

He gets put back in bed like a good patient, more tea given, and he eats his bread under Aaron’s watchful eye as he potters around, not unlike he did in their hut.

Robert wonders if Aaron will get in bed with him like he used to.

“It’s not one of your fancy authors,” Aaron says as he pulls the other side of the duvet down before pulling out a book from under the pillow.

 _He’s in Aaron’s bed. He’s been there this whole time_.

Robert accepts Aaron’s copy of _The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe_ with a curious sort of gaze.

“Didn’t know I was with a _nice_ boy.”

“Sod off, I liked it when I was a kid.”

Aaron takes his shoes and trousers off and gets in in his long sleeve top and pants. Robert puts the book down on the table next to the bed and, instead, rolls over so that he can put his head on Aaron’s shoulder.

With his arm tucked under Robert’s body, Aaron strokes his shoulder absently with his thumb while he thinks thoughts Robert can never know.

Robert looks up, and he can see a small sparse patch in Aaron’s stubble. Maybe hair doesn’t grow as thick there, maybe he shaved too close while he was trimming his beard, but Robert pokes his finger in the gap and Aaron looks down at him with a quizzical eyebrow raised.

The silence stretches out between them.

Robert reaches up as Aaron leans down and their lips press harder than is necessary. They both pull back a little and ease into it, Aaron catching Robert’s bottom lip with his teeth before soothing it with his tongue.

They stay like that awhile. Gentle lips and sighing breaths, Aaron rolling them so that Robert is under him, covered and protected by his body. It’s like this that Robert realises the changes in himself. He’s thinner, less strong, and in need of that protection. It doesn’t seem to bother Aaron as his fingers edge along Robert’s t-shirt, silently asking for permission.

He gives a curt nod, trying to ignore his apprehension as the top comes off and Aaron licks his more prominent collarbones. He flattens himself to Robert’s chest and noses along the artery in his neck like a vampire looking for their next meal, and it makes Robert laugh.

“Shut up,” Aaron muffles against his throat.

Fire sparked, Robert yanks Aaron’s shirt up, exposing his back to the air where the duvet has been pushed down and he splays his fingers over the warm skin, stroking up and down to enjoy the smoothness while turning his lips to press against Aaron’s temple.

Aaron pulls him down further in the bed by tugging on his hips and climbing up over him so that he would be sitting on Robert’s stomach if he wasn’t on his knees.

Strong fingers run through Robert’s hair, and he gets his hands on Aaron’s waistband only to be pushed off.

Robert holds Aaron’s back as he folds himself down, Aaron pulling him up at the same time until their lips are connected, Aaron pushing for more until Robert opens up to him and accepts it all with a soft moan.

It doesn’t take a lot for Aaron to slide back, his arse barely covered with his thin pants as he strives to rock harder on Robert’s groin, but also to swallow down any sounds they make to hide them from the rest of the house.

Aaron huffs, “You have to be quiet.”

Robert nudges Aaron’s nose and chases him for another kiss which he’s denied.

“Robert, ‘m serious, it’s not like before.”

 _In our hut, just the two of us, doing whatever we wanted_.

It’s truly inspirational to think about, but he understands. He just can’t help it; can’t help how he feels when Aaron touches him.

Aaron’s fingers dance on his skin, playing along his ribs before urging him to lie back down. Excitement races through his veins as they both shuffle off their bottoms, and Aaron nudges his legs apart, sure fingers wrapping around his dick as he hovers his face over Robert’s, teasing him with almost kisses.

Robert grapples with Aaron’s sides until he falls onto him with an oof, their hips sliding against each other and Robert encouraging that with the tilt of his pelvis. Aaron gets himself onto his elbows before he does the same, spitting on this palm before rubbing it on both of them, the attention dragging them both from semi-interested to hard.

Aaron looks down to where the heads of their cocks are just peeking out between their bellies, and Robert draws him up with his selfish need for more of Aaron’s tongue, curling his arms around Aaron’s shoulders as they wetly push against each other’s mouths. Robert uses one hand to grip Aaron’s arse to hold him in tighter, to press down harder as he thrusts himself alongside Robert’s cock as Robert slips away to dig his teeth into Aaron’s shoulder.

It’s not a bite, but a silent ‘o’ that hides how Robert wants to groan and cry out when Aaron rubs at the tip. Aaron wipes more spit on him and circles his fingers around the head, letting Robert push between them like he’s fucking them.

Everything is in hushed tones, his cries wordless and Aaron’s breathing heavy as he exerts himself, the bed softly creaking under them, but it’s silent in all the ways that matter. Robert touches Aaron’s face to get his attention and tries to impart that it’s okay to be himself, to share that.

“It’s not me,” Aaron twitches and his hips falter, but he picks his rhythm back up.

“What—?”

Robert feels the first lightning bolt in his belly and he curls up off the bed, shoulder almost knocking Aaron off him. Aaron whines like it went from Robert into him.

“You—you shut me out. Dead silence.”

Robert doesn’t understand, his body is coiling as tight as Aaron’s hand on him and he feels open and vulnerable to Aaron’s gaze as he always has.

He surges forward to take Aaron in hand after spitting on his own palm. Aaron screws his eyes shut for a moment before opening them and catching Robert’s eye. His left arm is gently shaking from holding himself up, but he keeps his hand moving over Robert, pinching just right so that the head slicks and Robert feels it in his balls. Robert wills himself to give Aaron that feeling, his mouth dropping open as Robert focuses more on him.

More than anything else, Robert chases that feeling of Aaron’s empathy inside him, but it never comes. Aaron twists his wrist, and Robert flies apart in every direction, neck arching on his pillow, his body trapped by the weight of Aaron’s as he leaks come onto his navel.

His hand stops as heat lances through every synapse in Robert’s body, Aaron pressing moist kisses against his throat as he breathes Robert in. Robert holds the back of his head in his other hand, traps him into sucking and biting a hickey in the vulnerable crease, the hint of teeth kicking up one last burst of pleasure.

Robert lets him go, looks down at Aaron wanting and he pushes at his hip to get him to go down on his back.

“Robert—”

He folds himself down, Aaron’s hand on his back, as he takes Aaron into his mouth. He’s only a little bit slick at the tip, so Robert hollows his cheeks and sucks him down with long bobs of his head, and Aaron’s fingers pinch his skin as his knee comes up and wavers like Aaron doesn’t know what to do with himself. Robert opens his mouth and lets more saliva dribble out before he uses his hand to spread it down, finger teasing at Aaron’s rim. Between the two, Aaron rocks uselessly in small movements side to side, trying to wriggle closer or away from Robert.

For all his warnings, Aaron is louder, first with his pants and then his whimpered cries as Robert tightens his mouth at the head and pushes gently in with his finger.

Aaron’s fingers pull painfully at Robert’s hair, surely to take a few strands with them, but Robert keeps going, the steadier stream of pre-come hits his tongue and Aaron’s fingers are rhythmic on his head, softer after than initial pull, until Robert lets up, mouth coming off but his thumb pressing under Aaron’s balls as his finger still eases its way inside.

It’s an awkward angle, he doesn’t have any lube, but Robert watches Aaron, with his eyes closed, bite the corner of his lip into his mouth and rock his hips a little to help Robert out. He opens them when he realises that Robert isn’t swallowing him down anymore, his blue eyes meeting his. Robert feels daft looking at him, but it gives him back that sense of who they were. The times they had on the stupid cot that didn’t fit two people, but they made it work. The way Robert just knew how to give Aaron what he wanted.

The hand in his hair slips around to his cheek, and Robert cracks open. He hides it by taking Aaron in his mouth again, but it’s done. His chest is wide open, a mess of a beating heart that throbs and pulses as he strives to finish what he started.

It also comes as a rush that he feels Aaron inside him. His empathy pushing in at every corner, filling him up until he gasps around Aaron’s cock, but he holds on against the tidal wave, curling his finger upward and Aaron dropping his knee out to the side as sparking embers and flashes of lightning go off in Robert’s brain.

Aaron doesn’t have any more than a hand on Robert’s shoulder, only he feels like he’s being touched all over his body, only in waves of crackling electricity that should hurt but instead they push to fill him, hard and wanting on his thigh again.

Aaron cries out, “shit,” and his thighs quiver. Almost. He’s almost there. Robert leans up and swirls his tongue across the head, pushing flatly with his finger in rubbing motions and Aaron seizes for a second, his body confused before it starts spilling hotly into Robert’s mouth.

Robert feels it. He feels Aaron come in his mouth, in his own body like a forest fire that rips through everything in its wake. His cock spurts against his thigh unaided as he keeps his mouth on Aaron, sucking out every last drop of anything he can get from him.

Aaron moans and taps at his shoulder. Robert finally lets him go, teasing his finger out gently.

Robert looks up at him, his back stiff from being curled up, but then it’s like: _oh, there you are_. Robert feels Aaron’s feelings inside him clear as day. His contentment is crashing waves at the seaside as he welcomes Robert against his side, and Robert snuggles himself down, wilfully ignorant of his own mess on his leg and belly.

“’s quiet,” Aaron says to him, and Robert feels himself well up. It is. But it’s not the sad darkness he’s been in for days, weeks, months. He still doesn’t know. It’s comforted and quiet; the gentle sound of Aaron’s heartbeat under his ear tells Robert he’s not alone.

Words of any sort choke in his throat so he doesn’t say them, instead, Aaron rubs his shoulders.

It’s quiet, but it’s not lonely.

 

 

*

 

In the morning, Aaron takes him into the village near the house. Robert can’t help but feel bound up and scared. Aaron pulls his hand out of his pocket and laces their fingers together as they walk.

No one gives them a second glance.

There isn’t a lot going on in the smaller village, but Aaron is able to get milk, teabags, and anything else he’s been asked to get. Robert peruses the shelves and a lot of them are bare, but it almost feels like it did before. That Robert is just out to get bits and bobs he needs with his boyfriend.

 _Boyfriend_.

Aaron pops up in a different aisle, looking at Robert with a smile. The connection between Robert’s feelings and how Aaron impresses his upon him is getting more and more blurry. Robert isn’t being consumed by Aaron’s feelings, but more that they overlay and inlay with his own. But he also finds there’s a shutter in his mind, a pull down from Ikea that if he tugs on it and hooks it down completely, Aaron can’t get inside.

It’s not a theory he’s tested, but it’s there.

Robert ends up standing in front of the condoms. He blinks because he can’t believe there are condoms. They’re extortionately priced, but they’re there. And so is lube. It’s soddin’ daylight robbery, but Aaron comes up behind him and chucks it in his basket.

Robert turns around, and they sway in each other’s space, “We can make do without.”

“We’ve fucked off condoms already, lube is the least we can afford,” Aaron snorts derisively at him.

In a different day, he and Aaron would have used them, would have made the decision to go together to the clinic to decide _not_ to use condoms. Robert feels sudden pangs for how it used to be.

“We’re okay,” Aaron affirms to him, _we’re safe_. Still, he chucks a box in anyway, and Robert smiles as he trails after him.

“Not much else to do without my books—” Robert stumbles into Aaron’s back as he stops dead in the shop.

People are staring and whispering. Robert looks around and he feels not a calm ocean, but crashing waves turning every which way as the sky darkens.

He makes a quick decision to move around Aaron and take his face in his hands. He kisses him slow, turning that tsunami into a water basin, but when he lets Aaron go, his eyes blinking, he loudly turns to the crowd.

“Alright! Enough of the show!”

People turn away in embarrassment and disgust. They get their shopping and go, Aaron tucking into Robert’s side as they both keenly make sure they’re not being followed.

 

 

They tell Lisa, who tells them they might need to move on.

“We want you to stay, love,” She takes Aaron’s hands, and he doesn’t flinch from her. “But if it’s not safe—”

“I get it.”

Robert feels awful. Like his being here is making Aaron choose. Aaron leaves him on the settee, he’s feeling stupidly tired after their trip, and Lisa packs them up a few bits from the kitchen.

“I don’t know what you did for him, but I have to thank you.”

He looks up and Lisa is wiping her hands on a tea towel as she walks over to him.

“When I heard what happened to our Chas after our Cain,” Robert doesn’t know that part, but he doesn’t ask, “I worried for ‘im. ‘Course I did. He wouldn’t come here and be with his family because it wasn’t safe.”

“But I think it hurt too much.”

Lisa worries her wedding rings, and Robert remembers she lost her husband.

“Even when he came running in in the dead of night, nothing but the clothes on his back, soaked through to the bone, he was hurting.”

Robert swallows, and Lisa smiles, still pained, but hopeful, “He stopped hurting when we found you. Set Belle up to get you out. Having you makes it easier for him.”

“But don’t let it be harder for you.”

He shakes his head, but Lisa holds his arm, “Robert, I can see it, love, even if you can’t. Be careful.”

Aaron comes marching down the stairs with two holdalls, Robert feels his determination, but for once, he tries to pull down the shutter in his mind. For a second, it’s quiet, but then it pings up like the hook didn’t sit right, and Robert doesn’t have the energy to try again.

 

 

*

 

Aaron drives because Robert feels bone tired, his head leaning on the window as he stares out at the scenery that passes him by.

Lisa is sending them to a town where she has friends. They know Aaron and Robert are coming and they’ll have a place for them in the local hotel.

Aaron touches his thigh and gives it a reassuring squeeze, “It’ll be fine.”

Robert has never done this, been on the run, but Aaron is tensionless in his calm and poise. He wishes he could take some of that for himself, but he can’t. There’s so much that is uncertain, not only in their future, but in the future as a whole. Joe’s desire to use Aaron as an effective weapon against the overthrow doesn’t cancel out the fact that those people still want Aaron dead. Either way, Aaron ends up dead. Or running.

Robert doesn’t know if he can do that. The night is drawing in, the dark fills him with a sense of dread that it didn’t before. He isn’t built to be strong. Everything he’s been up until now is bravado and a propped-up sense of self-worth. Joe stripped him of that, tore into Robert’s psyche and showed him that he wasn’t as strong as he thought he was.

“Robert,” Aaron is soft with him, urging him to let go of his thoughts and emotions, but he should know better than anyone that Robert can’t. What can he offer Aaron, but to be a burden?

Aaron indicates left and starts to pull into a town, deserted as most are, and the street lights flicker because their maintenance has fallen to the wayside, and Robert half expects a tumble weed to go by.

Aaron pulls over in a parking bay, nothing much about, and Robert frowns and looks over at him.

“You didn’t sign up for this.”

Robert sits up properly in his seat.

“The running, the hiding, the never really knowing what’s coming—”

“None of us do.”

“Yeah, but with me it’s different; I’m different.”

“You’re not fobbing me off, Aaron.”

Aaron sighs, “I’m not—Robert, you’re not okay.”

“I’ll be—”

“If you say fine I’ll throttle you.”

He shuts his mouth.

“I know you’re not, I can feel it.”

Robert feels himself be filled with a sense of laughter, eating popcorn, flicking rubberbands at your mate’s head in class.

“Don’t,” Robert looks at Aaron, “It’s false equivalence.”

“It’s what I can give ya.”

Part of him understands it. Aaron can help him, ease some of his discord, but it’s not real. Robert doesn’t feel better, he’s just weighing on Aaron’s already fragile balance.

Robert pulls the shutter and it locks into place in a way it didn’t before. Aaron…not flinches, but Robert knows he felt it. The severing of their open connection.

He isn’t doing it to shut Aaron out, but to keep himself in.

Aaron turns back to that he’s sitting facing ahead, almost sightless in his lack of focus.

“Does it hurt?” Robert asks him.

He licks his lips, “No, it’s still quiet.”

It’s lonely. Robert knows because he feels it too, but it’s how it’ll have to stay until things are better. Settled.

“Let’s go, they’ll be waiting for us,” Robert nudges, and Aaron starts the car back up.

Aaron isn’t cold towards him for the rest of the drive, but he isn’t himself either. It takes everything inside Robert to not open himself back up, to lean into Aaron and let him take away all his worries and cares. But it wouldn’t be fair. Only he would get to live the lie of a simpler life.

 

 

*

 

They’re welcomed in hushed tones and their room is on the ground floor, the implication for a quick escape doesn’t slip passed Robert.

He sits himself down on the bed and feels at a loss.

Aaron forces himself between Robert’s knees to help him take off his clothes. Robert looks up at him, blue eyes focused on his task, and he wants to cry. He presses his face into Aaron’s jumper and lets him cradle his head as he hangs his hands off of Aaron’s jeans and lets out all the tears he still has left to cry.

It’s ugly, and his face feels puffy, but Aaron kisses his cheek and gets his jeans off before pulling the cover over him and getting into the bed behind him again, twisting them both together like a two-flavoured pretzel. Robert notices that Aaron hasn’t turned off the lamp before getting into bed.

Another single tear slips down his cheek.

He wonders if anything will ever feel possible again.

“You don’t have to sleep,” Aaron says, shocking Robert out of his thoughts, “but you have to rest.”

Robert pushes Aaron to let him go so that he can turn over and face him in bed.

 _I love you_.

Curtain still down, Aaron doesn’t know. He can’t feel it.

Robert kisses Aaron with all the care he can fathom. It tips Aaron back, Robert going with him, their noses rubbing together before they kiss again, and Robert lies so that Aaron can rest his head on his shoulder. He breathes out shakily, and Aaron noses at his chest, his hand splaying on Robert’s stomach like a reassuring weight.

Robert falls asleep and everything is blessedly quiet.

 

 

Breakfast is more lively. The hotel owner is a lovely woman, Catalina, and her husband, Paulo, who try and feed them five kinds of cereal and six types of toasted bread.

“Will you stay?” She asks them kindly, so Robert suspects that she has no idea about Aaron.

“Nah, we’ve got jobs down in London,” Aaron says as he puts jam on his toast. It’s not true, they’re heading north to some backwards county in the hopes that there will be sod all people to ask questions. Maybe they’ll get a goat.

Catalina looks like she wants to say more, but she gets a spaced out look on her face before she picks up her coffee as if she never spoke at all.

Robert narrows his eyes at Aaron who shrugs.

It’s a blissful moment that doesn’t last. Robert gets out of the hot shower after their carb heavy meal and he catches Aaron pulling down his sleeve out the corner of his eye.

“Aaron.”

He hums, pretending like nothing is going on.

“ _Aaron_.”

Robert flicks his eyes down to Aaron’s arm and then back up to his face.

Aaron gets a stubborn look on his face, “’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.”

“Let’s not do this,” He puts his dirty trousers in his bag while sitting on the bed, and Robert grabs his elbow to stop him in his tracks.

“No, we are.”

“Sure, let’s go ‘round in another fucking circle.”

Aaron pulls his arm back and finishes stuffing his clothes into his bag.

“You said it was quiet in the car.”

“It was.”

Robert shut him out from his pain, but also from his quiet.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Like what? I know you feel like shit, Robert, but could you just let me poke around in your feelings because I feel like slicing my arm open?”

He knows Aaron is just trying to shock him with his language, his openness to his cutting, but Robert doesn’t falter.

“Yes.”

“Bullshit.”

“Hey,” Robert tries to grab Aaron and they end up tussling on the bed, and Robert loses the upper hand, Aaron sitting on his hips and holding his wrists.

“You can’t have it both ways, Robert. You can’t be in it but only be half in it.”

“I’m in it.”

“Are you?” Aaron asks him, his voice angry and frustrated, “Every time I think we’re getting somewhere, you shut me out.”

“Getting—where do you think we’re going?”

“Don’t you know?”

Aaron says it like Robert is the stupidest man on the planet.

Robert feels like he’s been punched in the gut. Everything, _everything,_ has been for Aaron. For how he feels about him.

Robert uses Aaron’s grip on him to knock his weight out from under him so that he falls onto Robert’s chest, and in the momentary confusion, he rolls Aaron under him, hand pinning his hips to the bed.

“ _I know_.”

They don’t bother getting undressed, Robert fights Aaron’s jeans off his hips, shoving at him until he rolls onto his belly under him and Robert can get off the bed to pull Aaron up onto his knees, yanking his own jeans down his thighs.

Aaron has the lube in his bag, Robert remembers, so he fishes it out of the front pocket with a condom and pushes Aaron’s back down so his arse comes further up.

He finds that Aaron’s jeans are still too far up, so he roughly yanks them down more and spreads Aaron’s cheeks before he spits on him and licks flatly against his skin. He doesn’t waste much time on it, he does it just long enough so that Aaron goes to put his hand around his cock, and Robert slaps it away, leaning back to put on the condom and coat his fingers in lube. One finger is fine, Aaron sighs into the unmade bed and huffs a little when Robert pushes too hard, the second, Robert watches him dig his knees into the bed and Aaron has to work to let him in. Three slows them both a little. Robert adds more lube and works to get his fingers inside and lets Aaron stroke himself to ease Robert’s way into his arse.

When he’s done, Robert slaps Aaron’s cheek and gets him off the bed, shuffling back so that Aaron’s on his front still, legs in front of Robert’s on the floor and his chest down. Robert squeezes the base of his dick after he covers himself in lube, still holding it when he’s nudging up against Aaron’s rim, his hand coming back onto Robert’s hip to guide him forward.

It’s a wall of impenetrable heat inside Aaron. He moans, and his other hand slaps back onto Robert’s hips until they’re flush against Aaron’s arse and the hair on it tickles Robert’s hipbones.

“Fuck,” Aaron whines, and Robert kicks his hips up, Aaron jerking forward on the bed, one of his hands having to go down to steady himself.

Robert puts his hands on Aaron’s waist, pinning him down to take those first few accommodating thrusts before he fucks him like he’s trying to go through him.

How _dare_ he think that Robert doesn’t care. It fills Robert with a sense of anger that spurs him on, to be relentless regardless of Aaron’s whimpers, him rubbing his face into the duvet and spreading his legs wider. He lifts the blind, lets Aaron in, but also pushes himself out. Overwhelms Aaron with his own sexual desire.

Aaron feels it, Robert knows, because he tries to push his hand between his belly and the bed to get at his cock, but there’s no space with Robert pressing on him.

 _Feel it_.

The sizzle is there, the tingle that tickles Robert at the base of his skull and winds up zooming down into his balls. He plasters himself to Aaron’s back, tucks his hands under his shoulders and thrusts into him in deep, penetrating thrusts that choke the whines in Aaron’s throat.

He doesn’t mean for it to come out, but there’s no way that it can’t.

“I love you.”

Aaron reaches up and pulls on Robert’s hair. To pull him away, or what, he doesn’t know.

“I love you, Aaron.”

He’s sweating, and it’s gathering at the base of his spine along with their combined feelings and pleasure coursing through his veins.

Robert lets himself up, once again puts his hands on Aaron’s back and he lengthens his thrusts, makes them so that he’s almost all the way out before he plunges back inside, Aaron groaning with every one, forcibly holding the duvet away from himself so that he doesn’t move.

 _I love you, I need you, you’re everything_.

 _Not be in this?_ Robert _is_ this. He’s Aaron’s to do with as he pleases.

Aaron comes biting the duvet between his teeth, crackling sparks like he always does, and Robert can’t hold on. More than any other time, they aren’t separate, his feelings are Aaron’s feelings and Aaron’s are his. Robert falls on Aaron’s back and just fucks him with just his hips, his mouth smearing on Aaron’s shoulder blades, wetting his top as his own moans spill from him and his cock pumps hotly into the condom.

It’s endless, his body continuing to give when he’s sure it should have stopped. Aaron’s fingers dig into his hips and make him stay there, as if he would go anywhere else.

His shower is null and void, but he doesn’t care, he breathes as deeply as he can and kisses the bottom of Aaron’s neck.

“I love you, and don’t think for one second I don’t.”

Robert feels something inexplicable inside his chest. It’s not his to claim, and he doesn’t force Aaron to name it either, he just peels himself off his back and deals with the condom and picks up his dirty towel to wipe Aaron clean.

Aaron pulls his jeans up and does them up before he turns to sit down, Robert looking for a jumper of his own to put on.

“So, I’m glad that’s cleared up,” Robert says, wiping his nose and holding one of Aaron’s hoodies he’s had to pilfer because he has nothing of his own.

Aaron stands up and cups Robert’s face in his hands and kisses him. He does that soft little nose rub that Robert has come to associate with _Aaron, affection, calm_.

“I heard ya.”

“Good.”

 

 

*

 

They pack up the last of their stuff and Aaron starts to get fidgety.

Robert frowns at him, “You okay?”

Aaron shakes his head, “Something—”

He feels it the same time Aaron does. Gunshot. Just off centre in the chest. _Heart_.

“Catalina,” Aaron gasps, and Robert grabs their stuff, Aaron moaning because he feels her pain more intensely than Robert does.

“C’mon, Aaron.”

He breathes heavily out before he forces himself upright and nods as Robert leads them out of their room towards the fire exit. Robert can hear the thundering footsteps, no real uniformity to them.

“Joe?”

Aaron nods his agreement, “He’s a loud wanker.”

Robert wants to laugh, but he pushes the door bar with his leg and it swings open, Aaron going ahead of him to keep it open as they run towards the car.

There’s a beep as Aaron unlocks it, practically throwing himself into the door before flinging it open. Robert gets around to the other side and shoves their bags in the back, himself in and the door closed so that Aaron can chuck it into reverse and get them out of there.

They should have expected it, but there’s a blockade. Robert sees some people he knows, some he doesn’t, Aaron trying to go back the way they came but more cars pull up, cutting off their other routes.

Robert feels it for the first time. Aaron preparing himself to fight. Not to throw his fists, but the emptiness skittling along his subconscious tells him he knows what Aaron is drawing upon.

“Don’t.”

Aaron looks at him.

“They aren’t worth it.”

“You think we’re going anywhere good if they catch us?”

“Do what you have to to keep us together, but Aaron, don’t hurt yourself. Not for me. Definitely not for them.”

The cold, distant feeling recedes, and Robert can see Joe walking between the cars. He’s got a suit on, from fuck knows where, looking like he should be in what was a GQ magazine. Robert can’t help the tremor that his body gives up, it remembering what he’s tried to push aside.

“Aaron. Robert. Come on, we’re all friends here.”

Yet, the people tasked with trying to get them out of the car do it gingerly.

“You can fuck right off, mate,” Aaron shouts to Joe. “It ain’t about distance.”

Joe stops at that. Aaron raises his eyebrows, daring Joe to make another move.

“I just want it to be over.”

Aaron scoffs, “Yeah? And what you did to Robert? Casualties of war?”

“Terrible, but necessary.”

“ _Never_.”

Joe shakes his head, “Aaron, you’d have a better ground to stand on if you hadn’t killed people.”

There’s a ripple amongst the people. A tittering of whispers.

“Maybe. But I never made them suffer. I never threw them in a dark place and left them to die.”

Robert wills himself to stay present, to listen to Aaron’s voice and not go back to that cave.

“What were you tryin’ to do? Robert wasn’t gonna give me up.”

Joe tilts his head, “No, he wasn’t. I guess I hoped it went both ways.”

Robert feels his gut recoil.

It was never about one or the other. Aaron over Robert. Joe needs them both.

Joe looks at him and smiles, cruel in how pleasant it is, “I think he’s got it.”

Aaron pulls at Robert’s sleeve.

“Aaron buys you power. I buy you time.”

“You do indeed. Aaron, gloriously powerful as you are, you’re a ticking timebomb. An emotional cataclysm. Robert is like a stuffed teddy bear that sends you to sleep at night. He makes you endless. He makes you _happy_.”

Robert shakes his head.

“And since there isn’t anything you wouldn’t do to keep him safe, that makes him leverage.”

He’s grabbed by his arms again, forced onto his knees, Aaron butting up against one of Joe’s mob.

“You can kill as many people as you want, Aaron, but if I kill him, you can’t save him.”

It’s a stalemate.

Joe treats it like a victory, “Toddle on then. Back to camp with both of you.”

 

 

*

 

Robert is one with Aaron in regard to the blinding rage he feels. It sustains him as they’re separated and shuttled back.

Aaron must have kicked up a fuss because they’re put together in their hut back in camp, only this time it’s surrounded by guards and stripped of anything other than the basic needs to live.

All of Robert’s books are gone. His teapot and the stupid little bowls he had to barter for. Everything.

 _I have Aaron_.

He wraps Aaron up in his arms and hides his face in Aaron’s hoodie, letting his hands rub up and down his back to comfort him. They don’t know if they’ll be cuffed now or later, so they take it for what it is.

Aaron talks first, “I don’t get it.”

“What?” Robert says as he pulls back to look at him.

“Okay, so he’s got me, he’s got you. Now what?”

“He uses you to get what he wants.”

“Yeah, but what does he want? The old government back? To _be_ the government? What’s his game?”

Robert sighs, “Does it matter?”

 _We’ve already lost_.

“Robert, come on.”

All Robert wants is this, time with Aaron, together, in each other’s arms. Fuck this. Fuck Joe. Fuck the world for doing this to them.

“He wants to bargain.”

Aaron draws his eyebrows into a frown, “Ya think?”

“He’s a businessman. He isn’t about getting his hands dirty. You’re a bargaining chip, the most powerful one on the board, and he did what they couldn’t, he circumvented your empathy.”

“So, he’s about to throw everyone under the bus?”

Robert laughs and grabs Aaron’s face for a quick kiss, “And it’ll be his downfall.”

He starts by kicking the door. They need to get the word out. It doesn’t need to be a lot of people, but one who talks.

Joe has predicated everyone’s survival being assured by being on his side. Robert was the traitor. Robert took Aaron away from them and Joe brought him back. Joe doesn’t give a shit about them. Not when he can buy back his life and then some with Aaron’s freedom.

“Aaron, you can’t,” he shouts. Aaron staring at him with his arms folded.

“Wanna bet?” His lips are quirked up in a smile, but his tone is appropriately scornful.

“Y’know how much strength that would take?”

“I could do it. I could wipe this camp off the face of the Earth.”

Robert waits, and he nods when he hears the scuffing off shoes on dusty ground.

“Keeping me locked up like some whippin’ boy, no thanks.”

“And the people?”

“They’re the ones keepin’ me locked up in here too.”

Robert is pretty sure they have a captive audience now, so he relays his realisations, “No, Joe is because Joe wants to buy himself back Home Farm and screw the rest of us. It’s how it was then and it’s how it is now.”

“Robert—”

“You weren’t here, Aaron, I was. I fought for my friends, for the families that worked side by side with my own. Joe, he wanted them to kneel. It’s all he’s ever wanted.”

The more Robert talks the more he knows it to be true. How stupid he was to have never seen it. He wonders about the dead woman, if she was even dead when they got to her. She must have revealed the truth about Aaron, and somehow, the truth about Robert. Bringing her back, she would have known about him. Maybe even warned Aaron off him.

“Aaron,” Robert turns around, “How didn’t you know about Joe?”

He frowns, “What’d’ya mean?”

“I mean, he knew how to play you after we found that woman, but what about before then? He couldn’t have hidden from you before that, even with me to muffle your signal.”

Aaron looks down with confusion, “I don’t—”

Ice hits Robert’s spine, then anger. Deep and furnace-like.

“My uncle.”

“Cain?”

“He died not long after Mum.”

Robert shakes his head, not on the same page and not able to work out Aaron’s process from his emotions.

“He thought that my cousin Debbie might have been an empath. She had a way with people, like her mum.”

 _Charity_.

“She was seeing some bloke, Cain weren’t happy about it, Charity hated him even more, she…” Aaron wipes his mouth, “She never wanted me to meet him. Said he wouldn’t be stayin’ long.”

It’s like a mosaic covered in mud and only now the water washing it clean to reveal the truth.

Robert fills in the gaps, “Joe was seeing Debbie, thinking she was an empath, her mum maybe being one, so he tried to make her like you; a back-up plan.”

 _By killing her dad. And her mum to hide the evidence_.

“So, where is she, what happened to her?”

Aaron shakes his head, “I don’t know.”

Robert turns to the door and he shouts, “Where is she, Joe? Where is Debbie?!”

There’s silence.

Robert sighs as he feels Aaron’s guilt, thick like tar, trying to pull him down into a quicksand spiral, “C’mere.”

“I was so focused on my own back, I didn’t even notice.”

“It’s not like she was forthcoming either.”

“Yeah, now look at us.”

“We’ll find her.”

“Her? Or her body?”

“Either, and then we make him pay.”

 

 

Aaron taps his foot on the floor, an angry tic that he can’t seem to shake, but Robert will take it over him beating himself up over Debbie.

Someone opens the door to shove in a cart of food. Robert is on his feet, “Hey, hey, I want to talk to someone.”

The door slams shut.

Aaron lists his head to the side, “Give it up, Robert.”

“Weren’t you just the one giving me the rousing name call and implied pull yourself together?”

“I was wrong.”

“You weren’t. We have ‘im, dead to rights. People knew Debbie, cared about her. Cared about all your family.”

“Same way they cared about yours?”

Robert feels the sting of Aaron’s words, but also the immediate soothing balm of Aaron’s apologetic look.

“We just need to get out of here, and out there,” Robert says trying to convince them both. “If we could just—”

“Aaron.”

“Do you think you could make someone come over here?”

Aaron tilts his head, “What’d’ya mean?”

“Could you make them want to come over here?”

“Yeah,” Aaron stands up. “I just need to know who I’m focusing on.”

Robert’s hut only has one small window, and with no way to make glass, it’s high up and uses a leaf to keep out the rain. He hops up to take the leaf down. He jumps up again to see who’s out there, but he doesn’t really get a good look.

Aaron rolls his eyes and huffs, “Lemme give you a leg up.”

Between the two of them they get Robert looking through the window and he sees Ross outside. Not the best option, but easily controllable. Or so Robert assumes.

“Ross.”

“Ross?” Aaron wrinkles his nose, and Robert pinches his arm.

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Right.”

Aaron closes his eyes, and Robert tries to stay out of his way, but he feels Aaron rummage through his own feelings for the ones he needs. It isn’t like he feels ‘I need you’, it’s subtler than that. He spreads out coaxing feelings like a cold beer on a hot day, the way burgers taste on a barbeque, the feeling you get in your gut when you race a fast car.

Aaron opens his eyes with a heavy pant, like he’s exerted himself, “He won’t suspect it like that.”

“Are you—?” Robert holds Aaron up by his shoulders, and he nods.

“Got my lucky charm.”

Robert doesn’t take it for granted. Just this morning he and Aaron fought over his coping mechanisms. Now he’s asking him to push harder than he’s ever pushed before.

Aaron rolls his eyes, “Stop fretting.”

It works because Ross commands their guards to leave and he opens the door.

He frowns as he realises who he’s looking at, Robert lunges forward and drags Ross inside and Aaron helps him get Ross on the floor and to sit on him.

“Tables ‘ave turned,” Aaron says as Ross futilely kicks up under Aaron’s knee in the middle of his back, Robert on his legs.

“Fuck off the pair of you.”

“Ross, what do you know about Joe?” Robert asks him.

“He was here when you two pissed off, now ger’off me.”

Robert feels a sense of satisfaction that’s not his own.

Aaron hisses through gritted teeth, “Like he was here for Debbie.”

Ross goes limp.

Aaron lets Ross go and stands up again, “Ross used to date Debbie before she met her new bloke.”

“And?” Ross throws at them. His nonchalance is so put on its barely worth the performance.

Robert gets off him too, “We think Joe had something to do with her disappearance.”

Ross rolls over with a confused and angry look on his face, “You what?”

“You heard,” Aaron folds his arms, “Half my family is dead, and he’s sitting pretty. Looks like he cared about Debbie a lot.”

“You really think he had something to do—”

“Wouldn’t be asking you now, would I?”

Robert gets between the two of them, “Joe isn’t interested in helping anyone but himself. He proved that with Aaron, and now, maybe with Debbie.”

Ross’s mental cogs turn, and Aaron looks away in disgust.

“What’d’ya need?” He asks, and Robert smiles.

 

 

*

 

Turns out, Ross eagerly filled Robert’s void in meetings, setting himself up as Joe’s deputy and no one questions it when he calls a meeting in the square.

Robert can hear the noise as everyone starts to filter in. His excitement is only heightened by Aaron’s. They’re doing this. They’re getting out.

Ross assigns people Aaron remembers to make it easier for him to control them. He can do it without, but it’s more like laying out a blanket, or going fishing, it’s less accurate and less likely to work.

The lock snicks open, and they head towards the square.

They stay in the shadows as Joe walks into the crowd, confusion on his face, “What’s going on here then?”

Ross rises to the occasion, his theatricality on full display, “Just a meeting, mate, what to do about them two daisies.”

Robert mentally flips him off, but he keeps quiet.

“We’re going to—”

“We?” Ross puts a hand on his chest, “ _We_?”

“Ross—”

Ross stands up on one of the tree stumps so that everyone can see him, “We are going to do nothing. _You_ are going to tell me where Debbie Dingle is.”

The ripple of whispers kicks off again.

Joe looks around and smiles, “What do you mean?”

“You’ve only ever tried to look after number one, I respect that. I don’t respect you getting rid of a woman I used to love.”

 _Used to my arse_ , Robert snorts, grabbing Aaron’s hand in his.

“Joseph Tate is a resolute businessman, and why do something for free when you can do a deal, am I right?”

Everyone looks more confused than before, but Ross has them, he has them pinned with his words.

“He wants you to believe you need him, he’ll save you from the shitty lives you’ve been living, but he won’t. He’ll hand Aaron over, Robert too like a shitty gift with purchase to get what _he_ wants.”

“And you know how I know, because he loved Debbie too. But where is she? Where is she, Joe?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about—” Joe laughs, but it’s uncomfortable and put on.

People have long memories, especially in a village like Emmerdale.

“We thought we lost her like we did Cain and Charity,” Someone shouts, maybe Priya.

Ross laughs, “Oh. Oh, that my friends is the best part.”

Aaron pushes his way through until people see that it’s him and they part, “You killed them. You killed my family.”

Joe looks at him and shakes his head, “No.”

Robert feels pain, not directed at him, but Aaron drawing from him to sustain what he’s about to do. He pours it onto Joe. Drowns him in agony, in what it feels like to be pushed to the brink, the pain that comes with a too deep cut, holding onto people he has loved and lost. It’s enough to drive anyone mad.

Joe’s eyes are red and streaming, real tears for once as he feels the onslaught that Aaron refuses to let up. He folds down onto his knees.

“You tell me where she is.”

“I don’t—”

“Liar.”

Joe lays his head on the ground, almost completely crushed by the emotional weight.

“Aaron,” Robert calls him.

Aaron looks back at him.

“Please.”

 _Not for him, for you_. For me.

“You gave me Robert,” Aaron says as he pulls away emotionally, putting everything back in their boxes, “This is the only reprieve you’ll ever get.”

“The caves.”

It’s confirmation of her whereabouts, but also his guilt. The people can have him now. Aaron’s done with him, Robert can feel it.

Aaron ignores everyone and everything, he heads straight for Robert’s arms and Robert welcomes him into them.

“I love you.”

Robert tries to look Aaron in the face, but he’s hidden away. Slowly he lifts his head, “I love you, and I don’t want to lose you.”

He wants to say Aaron won’t, but the jobs not done.

 

Aaron collapses with exhaustion and Robert stays by his side.

 

Ross leads the charge for Debbie’s rescue.

 

Joe is charged publicly for his crimes and sent to the caves where he kept Debbie locked up and alone in the dark. She and Aaron reunite before he sends her up to Lisa’s. She needs more family than just him, and selfishly, he can’t handle her pain. It’s too raw and too much like his own.

 

 

Robert gets their hut put back together and proudly shows it to Aaron as he stands in the doorway.

“Time to christen it?” He asks, and Robert smiles.

“It’s luckier the second time ‘round.”

“Second? You’d be lucky if it was the twentieth.”

 

 

*

 

April comes to hang out with them while Robert is making pasta.

“So, is Aaron not the saviour then?”

Robert blinks, he’s knocked a bit off guard as it’s not something they’ve talked about and everyone has given them a wide berth in light of recent events.

“Aaron can affect change,” Robert says cautiously, “But it’s figuring out how to do that…right.”

“So he is?”

Robert looks at him, still reading in his little reading nook of next to the door, “For now, if he wants.”

 


End file.
